Jean Lemaire, an Actuarial Science & Risk Management Professor at Wharton has a new paper forthcoming in the Journal of Risk and Insurance. I can not link to the paper and I can’t find it on SSRN, but he has posted a summary as well as some slides. The costs he calculates are quite high:
To put things in an epidemiological context, Lemaire points out that "among all fatal injuries, only motor vehicle accidents have a stronger effect [than firearm deaths]." Further, the numbers show that "the elimination of all firearm deaths in the U.S. would increase the male life expectancy more than the total eradication of all colon and prostate cancers."
I am not sure he counts the number of “life days” saved by guns used as a deterrence to crime or what the systemic costs would be if no one had guns. Would we use rocks, paper or scissors? We’ll just have to wait for the paper to come out!
via Actuary.net
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